This ~8 minute read explains how to make “Beyond Mythic” Amulets!

What’s an Amulet?

Amulets can be seen as a fun way to understand proof-of-work. As described in the Bitcoin whitepaper, “proof-of-work involves scanning for a value that when hashed, such as with SHA-256, the hash begins with a number of zero bits.”

According to at.amulet.garden, “an Amulet is a kind of poem that depends on language, code, and luck: (1) its complete Unicode text is 64 bytes or less; and (2) the hexadecimal SHA-256 hash of the text includes four or more 8s in a row.”

Moreover, “the odds a person can type something into the scratchpad and discover an Amulet are very, very, very, VERY low! It’s much more practical to ‘discover’ amulets with a computer program.”

Therefore, an Amulet can be described as a computationally rare input/output “two-sided coin” type poem, a “cyberpoem” of sorts: (1) the “input-side” text is arbitrary; and (2) then the “output-side” text is the hash of the input-side text.

Though Amulet rules don’t require it, the input-side text of the Amulet is often used as the only part of the Amulet that fixates poetic expression, with the output-side text as nothing more than a randomized content filtration system.

For instance, here’s a “Legendary” Amulet ‘discovered’ in a public domain book of poems: “Tight straps his short trews to meet shiny boots drew,”

This is cool, but Amulets have the potential to be much more “cyberpoetic.”

What’s an Amulet’s cyberpoetic potential?

Amulets can be more than just “poems with a randomized content filtration system;” the interplay between the input-side text and the output-side text offers us a new source of poetic expression fixation via “cyberpoetry.”

To access these cyberpoetic input/output expressions, all we have to do is design a “suffix” natural integer count method for Amulets, inspired by the pinpoint citation method.

What’s pinpoint citation?

The pinpoint citation method, used by the Supreme Court of Canada when they publish their reasons for judgment, gives each paragraph a natural integer count index as it appears in sequential order.

It might not seem like an important library science innovation but, because the pinpoint citation method is unopinionated about page size, it can be included in page dynamic HTML publications without issue, unlike page numbering methods.

Indeed, many program languages such as JavaScript and Python are designed around the “while-loop” concept, so pinpoint citation is easy to express with those languages.

What’s an Amulet suffix?

Applying the pinpoint citation method to Amulets, in part by recognizing that natural language and integers need not be separate expressions, we can append a cryptographic salt “suffix” to the end of the arbitrary input-side text for an elegant and consistent method that generates Amulets of any given rarity.

For instance, here’s the first Amulet I minted with this suffix method, a “Beyond Mythic” Amulet using “ #” as the suffix’s initiating text: “The art and science of a win-win game. #6370414414”

The “generating script” is very simple. A while-loop spins along the natural integer count, appending each suffix attempt to the end of the arbitrary input-side text one-by-one until the script finds an Amulet with the specified rarity. For “The art and science of a win-win game. #6370414414,” it took 6370414415 while-loop calls until the generating script found a “Beyond Mythic” Amulet.

As such, though it takes just 1 hash input/output call to confirm “The art and science of a win-win game. #6370414414” is definitely a “Beyond Mythic” Amulet, it takes 6370414415 while-loop calls to confirm “The art and science of a win-win game. #6370414414” is indeed the first “Beyond Mythic” Amulet along the suffix’s natural integer count.

Unlike the natural integer count sequence part of the suffix method, its “ #” initiating text is an arbitrary decision. For instance, here’s a related Loot upgrade concept that uses “, ” instead of “ #” as the suffix’s initiating text. This Loot upgrade also limits the suffix’s natural integer count to a maximum of 88.

Additionally, the suffix method can be used as a proof-of-work username NFT registration requirement. For instance, here’s my “bestape” handle as a “Beyond Mythic” Amulet: “bestape #24148490623”

Along the same lines, the act of minting an Amulet can trigger some kind of network event, like automatically tweeting parsable input-side text when minted. For executable input-side text, the suffix’s initiating text can use a “ #!” hash-bang protocol.

But we don’t need to stop there! Let’s use this suffix method to explore “rhythmic structures” by playing around with the input/output relationship for new kinds of cyberpoetic expressions:

• The output-side text is also valid input-side text.
  • Here’s an example with 3 Amulets chained in a row: “Three matryoshka dolls. #4165606038” input-side text, “8c5789ea588889f1e48f26bc208e35307dca6f5402a9b9319fc1eee8a81fb431” output-side text and input-side text, “d577a0ce5ef3328431525a26375cff364559ab2ebe88882ed5ef019e80a54d11” output-side text and input-side text, “8a3879839512bfd9749106b82d888899789595ef17b4eeca7e2f8aa036410494” output-side text and input-side text.
• The input-side text contains more than one suffix.
  • Here’s an example that lists all of the named Amulet rarities: “totem #2910 #42244 #973026 #4400637 #89846489 #2658506987”
  • Here’s an example that varies the Amulet rarity to produce Morse code: “SOS #1040 #89 #307 #12712452 #278094 #7770713 #199 #582 #375”
• The output-side text includes words.
  • Here’s an example that references a well-known etymological reciprocal by putting one side of the reciprocal within the input-side text and the other side of the reciprocal within the output-side text: “living cow Amulet #1142124359” input-side text, “75f88885a3f9d55872ee90f8e4911125922661667beef05d3dead81399f5226e” output-side text.

Natural integer counts.

A suffix method isn’t necessary to compose input/output two-sided coin cyberpoetic expressions.

For instance, here’s an example where the natural integer count is integrated into a sentence instead of within a suffix: “It took me 840,533,304 attempts to find this amulet.”

In that example, the “Mythic” 8s start at the beginning of the output-side text: “888888888a3560693561f91dc9d83d5efdc3df6196beaeb0c9f2b8255a47ac73”

Because the natural integer count is a normalized measure, we can plot all of the Amulets that include natural integer counts in their input-side text onto a single graph, and learn more about “the odds a person can type something into the scratchpad and discover an Amulet.”

Still, it’s uncertain if the integers within an Amulet’s input-side text are actually the smallest natural integer count magnitude possible for a given rarity, unless we run a natural integer count ourselves. So, we should take the results of whatever community-sourced graphs we plot with a healthy grain of salt.